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14 MASS CULTURE skills and abilities required to appreciate and understand high culture. For some, like MacDonald, this would not be that much of a problem if the people could keep to their own folk cultural pastimes, and leave art to the elite. For others, however, it served as a warning of just how pernicious the hold of mass culture could be. Dell’ or ‘Tarzan’ should be convenient symbols, drawn from hearsay rather than first-hand knowledge. But what close at hand is apparently trivial becomes a serious development when we realise that this means nothing less than that the general public—Dr Johnson’s common reader—has now not even a glimpse of the living interests of modern literature, is ignorant of its growth and so prevented from developing with it, and that the critical minority to whose sole charge modern literature has now fallen is isolated, disowned by the general public and threatened with extinction.

First, it must carry out research to show just how bad things have become, how far the literary standards and reading capacities of the general public have declined and how restricted a role the serious novel and writer have to play in cultural life. This will equip the elite with the information it needs to carry out its mission to reverse the decline produced by mass culture, rather than enlightening the people directly. : 271). ). Here the function of the ‘conscious minority’ is, first, to constitute an elite avant-garde which will substantiate and disseminate its interpretation of the rise of mass culture, and warn the population about, and try to reverse, the decline of serious culture; and, second, to regain its position of authority in education, and hence its position of authority as the ultimate arbiter of cultural and artistic taste and values.

In this context it is possible to contrast Hebdige’s arguments with those put forward by Hoggart. For Hebdige, fears about Americanisation in the post-war period were linked to fears about the threat posed to traditional intellectual elites and their judgements about taste by the ‘levelling-down process’. Ideas about America being more populist and democratic fed into concerns about increasing working-class affluence and consumption which threatened the intellectual arbitration of taste and middle-class consumption as forms of symbolic and positional power.